


Twin stars, twin hearts

by fire_ice_rage



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Dark Doctor (Doctor Who), F/F, Thirteen Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-10-02 00:35:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20450414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fire_ice_rage/pseuds/fire_ice_rage
Summary: Running with the Doctor at her back was comforting; a welcome, quintessential part of life on board the TARDIS.Running from the Doctor was altogether another matter: a horrific, harrowing experience she hoped never to repeat.(Thirteen Week prompt: Run).





	Twin stars, twin hearts

**Author's Note:**

> A late fill for Thirteen Week's Day Two prompt: Run.

Yaz was well accustomed to running with the Doctor.

Well, _with_ the Doctor was perhaps a slight misnomer; more often than not, when the danger was behind them, the Doctor had a habit of staying at the back, herding them like lost sheep, making sure every single one of her friends made it to safety—that if trouble caught up with them, she’d be between her fam and danger. That she would be there to stop whatever was after them.

Yaz tried to hang back with the Doctor at first, wanting to stay near her, wanting to help her. Wanting to keep her safe, the way she kept of all them safe. After all, the Doctor had planets, entire galaxies to worry about—heck, the way she slumped forward sometimes, ancient grief in her eyes, it seemed like she carried responsibility for all of time and space on her shoulders. How could any being, even one as old and powerful and wise as the Doctor, bear such a weight? And if she guarded the Universe, who guarded her?

Yaz's hope to look out for the Doctor lasted until the second time Ryan and Graham led them down the wrong corridor, towards rather than away from danger. To Yaz’s frustration, they were apparently deaf to her cries that they’d turned the wrong way, leaving her, the Hath they were assisting, and the Doctor no other choice but to plunder after them. When it was over, the Doctor had taken her aside, and firmly told her she needed her leading the way.

“There’s no one whose leadership skills I trust more,” she said, hands heavy on Yaz’s shoulders. She smiled down at her, gaze soft and warm as she looked into her eyes. Yaz swallowed, warmth and pride surging in her chest. 

The primary exception to the Doctor hanging back was when she was rushing off to do something clever, when she had a plan. Or, more usually, a vague idea how to save the day, which Yaz was sure was mostly conceptual.

“Oi! Half a plan,” the Doctor insisted when she pointed this out. “All right, quarter of a plan at a push.”

When the Doctor was on a mission to get to a control room or pilot’s chair or diplomatic chambers, she’d surge ahead of all of them, with what was definitely more than human speed. Two hearts surely came in handy when she needed them. Even then, she was always looking back at them, making sure they were safe. If she saw she’d gotten too far ahead, she’d pause, worry and annoyance flickering over her face as her eyes fluttered between them and her goals ahead.

“_Go,_” Yaz would say. _I’ve got this_, she would urge with a sweeping gesture, shooing the Doctor forward with her hands.

Running with the Doctor at her back was comforting; even with Graham, Ryan, and whatever friends they made along the way between them, she felt the Doctor’s power behind her, felt it reaching up to envelop her in a protective bubble, and knew that she was safe.

Running with the Doctor was a welcome, quintessential part of life on board the TARDIS. The mix of adrenaline and a strange, joyous sort of fear swelling in her veins, her heart pounding, breaths coming hard and fast, and the dull, throbbing ache in her legs the next day reminding her of the good they had done. And under it all, the knowledge that the Doctor would always save them.

Running from the Doctor was altogether another matter: a horrific, harrowing experience she hoped never to repeat. An icy chill settled in her chest, threatening to claw its way out of her throat in a breathless scream as she ran. A hopeless terror, so different from the usual adrenaline fueled joy-panic. 

_No_, she shook her head; she knew it wasn’t the Doctor. Not really. The Doctor, she reminded herself, was three floors down in the lab, already working hurriedly to find a cure for the devastating plague raging across Straetigorph. If anyone could develop a vaccine, it was the Doctor.

But that was precisely the problem, wasn’t it? Because the woman responsible for unleashing the devastating Spinning Death that had already killed three quarters of Straetigorph's inhabitants _wasn’t_ the Doctor, she wasn't she wasn't she _wasn't_. Only… she was, in a way, wasn’t she?

The same body, even if, as the Doctor said, it was from a different timeline. The same tendency to talk a mile a minute, saying so much yet revealing nothing—nothing of substance, anyway; hiding behind her quicksilver tongue. The same two hearts, the same hazel-green eyes shining with mirth and ancient, tired wisdom in equal measure; the same habit of scrunching up her face with a wrinkle of her nose and twist of her lips; the same face that could shift from something warm and soft and open to cold, hardened steel in the blink of an eye.

The same too-clever mind turned to destruction as easily as salvation, capable of as much ill as it was good.

Even the ludicrous dress sense—the black cravat, loose around her muscular neck, the dark grey suspenders holding up an expensive looking pair of black trousers, the fitted silky white button down shirt, the shiny black shoes. It suited her. It seemed so perfectly _Doctor_, Yaz was almost surprised she’d never seen her in the outfit—add a bit more colour, and she could definitely envision the Doctor, _her_ Doctor, donning it with her typical overzealous gusto.

That’s what scared Yaz so much about the Valeyard. It wasn’t just that she wore the same face as the woman she loved; the face, without all those other similarities piling up, she could have ignored. Or she’d like to think she could have, if she pushed hard enough away from the image, if she didn’t look in the Valeyard’s eyes.  
  
Trouble was—everything about the Valeyard was, at its core, so _exactly, _quintessentially, the Doctor. Twisted and wrong and lurid, perhaps, but so essentially, completely the Doctor, it sent chills up Yaz’s spine.

When the Do—when the Valeyard, she chastised herself, squeezing her eyes shut for a brief moment at the memory as she ran. When the Valeyard had stroked her forefinger across Yaz’s cheek and smiled, showing her teeth, Yaz shivered because she’d caught glimpses of that smile on the Doctor’s face.   
  
Oh, the Doctor tried to hide it from her fam, all right, that much was obvious to Yaz, but she'd seen it. The Doctor may have been an alien, but Yaz was a cop with a keen eye and even keener mind—she knew when someone was up to something, trying to _hide_ something from her. And so Yaz had searched, through careful observation, for the things the Doctor kept from them, the darkness she hid between the cracks in her too-quick smiles and fast talking flippancy.  
  
What she found was the cold, dark eyed, almost maniacal grin that spread across the Doctor’s face when the worst of the worst challenged her, when confronted by the most despicable acts of cruelty the Universe had to offer. The way her body went rigid and still, back straight, muscles tensing in her arms as she squeezed her hands together with all her might, a tightly coiled snake on the cusp of striking. The way she folded her clasped hands neatly across her thighs, as though holding herself back.

The Valeyard did not hold herself back. That was perhaps the only visible difference Yaz discerned between them. She was the Doctor, untethered. The Doctor in every way, except the one that mattered most.

She brushed her finger from beneath Yaz’s eye, down her cheek to her jaw, smiling that terrible smile. Her teeth glinted in the eerie green lights of the cavern around them, something malicious and unfathomably dark burning in her eyes. Yaz gulped, blood pumping, frozen to the spot. The Valeyard leaned forward, her lips, identical to the soft rosy lips Yaz had longed to kiss for so long, nearly brushing Yaz’s ear. “Run,” she whispered.

Without a second thought, Yaz turned on her heels and ran, not daring to look back. Because that smile held no mercy. In the right hands, she had seen that smile topple fascist regimes, restructure entire societies in the blink of an eye, end wars, stop plagues, save planets. Kill monsters.   
  
She didn’t want to know what that smile could—_would_—do in the wrong hands, free of the Doctor’s rules, unbound by her carefully constructed morality.

The Valeyard terrified Yaz, because in spite of what the Doctor said to the contrary, she wasn’t sure they were all that different. Under the right circumstances, mightn’t the Doctor, _her _Doctor, be capable of exactly the same?


End file.
